This week we’re excited to present a conversation with writer/director Robert Eggers who recently joined us for a Q&A following a screening of his highly anticipated new feature Nosferatu.
Across four intensely stylish, powerfully atmospheric and richly detailed feature films, Robert Eggers has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular auteurs. His work looks to different historical periods, folkloric traditions, and the abject and the arcane alike to craft enigmatic and utterly gripping parables about madness, the antagonism between man and nature, and desire as all-consuming compulsion. But his films, while deeply researched and steeped in worlds that themselves predate the advent of cinema, are nevertheless plainly the output of a passionate cinephile, an artist both in conversation with film history and in conversation with the the history of the occult. This is particularly evident in his latest, Nosferatu, which takes up the challenge of reinventing the story of Dracula after the seminal treatments by F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few.
This February, Film at Lincoln Center is excited to present Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents, a special series made up of the films that inspired Eggers’s spellbinding new take on fiction’s most famous monster, an eclectic can’t-miss array of gothic Hollywood deep cuts, rare works of Eastern European folk horror, and captivating evocations of 18th-century England, as well as a special screening on 35mm of his own Nosferatu. Stay tuned to filmlinc.org for more information.
This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan.
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#571 - Sigrid Nunez on The Room Next Door and The Friend
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with author Sigrid Nunez.
With her novels The Friend (winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction) and What Are You Going Through, New York–based author Sigrid Nunez has supplied the extraordinarily rich source material for not one, but two films in the NYFF62 lineup: Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Spotlight standout The Friend, starring Naomi Watts as a writer mourning the complicated loss of a beloved mentor; and Pedro Almodóvar’s Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, which follows another writer (Julianne Moore) as she reconnects with a friend from her past (Tilda Swinton) who approaches her with an unusual request.
We were honored to welcome Nunez for a special conversation about her prismatic literary meditations on grief, friendship, and the passage of time; the experience of seeing her creative work adapted into other mediums; and cinema’s alchemical capacity to both translate and transform a novel’s meaning. This conversation was moderated by A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review.
A New York Times Critic’s Pick, Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door is now playing at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/room
NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO.
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#570 - RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins on Nickel Boys, Adapting Colson Whitehead, and More
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross and Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk director Barry Jenkins.
The Opening Night selection of NYFF62, Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters, courtesy of Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios.
Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with the NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We were thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series.
NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO.
This Free Talk between RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.
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#569 - Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Oh, Canada director Paul Schrader.
Oh, Canada is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber.
In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona.
This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini.
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#568 - Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and John Turturro on The Room Next Door
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Room Next Door director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro.
The Room Next Door opens at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20th. Get tickets a filmlinc.org/room
Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.
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